Adam Walsh's Killer May Be Toole After All

Investigators Are Following Up A Tip About The Deathbed Statements Of Convicted Killer Ottis Elwood Toole.

September 18, 1997|By Knight-Ridder Newspapers

The prime suspect in the 1981 abduction and slaying of 6-year-old Adam Walsh may have confessed on his deathbed at a Florida prison last year.

Union Correction Center Superintendent Dennis O'Neill has opened an inquiry following a tip about the deathbed statements of convicted killer Ottis Elwood Toole, 49, a drifter with a 70 IQ and a violent streak.

The tip came from a former medical director at the North Florida Reception Center in Lake Butler, where Toole died Sept. 15, 1996. The tip came through America's Most Wanted, the crime-fighting television series hosted by Adam's father John.

''It would really mean a lot if it's true,'' Walsh said Wednesday.

''Why would a dying man lie?''

Walsh said he received a call from the prison doctor who said he didn't hear the confession directly but heard other medical staff talking about it.

''I guess he had to get it off his chest about that Adam Walsh thing,'' the doctor heard another staff member say, according to Joe Matthews, retired supervisor of homicide investigations at the Miami Beach Police Department and the polygraph examiner who tested other suspects in the Walsh case.

Walsh said he called Matthews with the tip because of Matthews' previous involvement in the case. Hollywood police investigators, who considered Toole a prime suspect, have had reason to question Toole in the past.

He has twice confessed to the murder and twice denied any role.

Toole, a friend of notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, now on death row in Texas, first confessed to the Walsh slaying in 1983 while being interrogated for other crimes in Jacksonville.

Hollywood investigators brought him to the scene, where Toole was able to point out key locations. But Toole later recanted, and without physical evidence no arrest was made.

In the years that followed, witnesses came forward to say they saw Toole snatch Walsh from the Hollywood Mall and then drive away in a black over white Cadillac. That Cadillac was confiscated and bloody carpet samples were taken, but both the carpet samples disappeared from storage and the Cadillac was sold for scrap before DNA blood technology was developed.

In 1996, convicted murderer and Toole's former lover Henry Lee Lucas said that he saw Adam's body. Lucas, awaiting execution for a Texas killing, said Toole showed him the body in a shallow grave.

Toole had previously confessed to scores of killings with Lucas, saying the two had murdered nearly 200 people as they traveled the country.